Subject: RE: dogfood feedback -- Smart Quotes
From: WJCarpenter (bill-abisource@carpenter.ORG)
Date: Thu Feb 22 2001 - 16:44:24 CST
paul> Essentially, you want a user-atomic change from the old-quoted
paul> state to the new-quoted state, with no change to the IP. Right?
Right.
paul> The cheap & obvious hack would be to replace the entire quoted
paul> passage, instead of just the quote character(s), but I haven't
Well, something like that might be made to work, but it certainly
doesn't have a very good feel to it.
The smartquote stuff gets along just fine with a 1-character memory
(plus the ability to look at 1 character of the context of that
character), and even that was a bit of a chore to get right. To make
such multiple character UNDO records, it sounds like a lot of
additonal complexity and maintenance woe to me.
Another approach could be to make it easier to type in a
non-smart-quote character. Some simple and intuitive UI thingy that
toggles off the smart quoting for a single character, or just makes it
easier to toggle it on/off, period. The smart quote toggle is a bit
deep in the menus right now, but if we ever get to customized
toolbars, someone who needs this frequently can just have a toolbar
button for it. Or, it could be promoted to a menu item with a check
mark for enabled.
((To be frank, it wasn't obvious to me that UNDO should do the thing
that it tries to do now. Along the way, someone pointed out that
that's the canonical way to get incidental non-smart-quotes in MSWord.
It seems plain enough, but it had never occured to me to try it
before. So, maybe making the UNDO "just work" isn't meeting a common
user expectation anyhow. Beats me.))
Before I sort of ran out of implementation steam, I had this idea of
being able to do a selection and then asking for smart quote promotion
or demotion on the selection. The trivial case of this would be the
selection of a single character or a few characters. If the operation
on selected regions were implemented, it probably wouldn't seem too
outrageous to wire it into the "Edit" menu or the right-click context
menu.
-- bill@carpenter.ORG (WJCarpenter) PGP 0x91865119 38 95 1B 69 C9 C6 3D 25 73 46 32 04 69 D6 ED F3
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